Few musicians, if any, can match it. The volume is so high, the tempo so fast and the tension so thick, Pharoah Sanders puts down his saxophone, screams and then returns to it for his sprawling improvisation.

It's a moment his audience expects. The saxophone innovator has come to symbolize the flammability and spirituality of what's called the jazz avant-garde. But his glorified role in John Coltrane's quintet of the 1960s is so mythologized, many people overlook Sanders' vision beyond it.

Now 65, Sanders, with disarming eyes and a chinstrap beard, continues to make some wrenching, hulking and, at the same time, serene music. His Bay Area reputation continues to grow, ever since he moved to Oakland from Little Rock, Ark., in 1959. A Los Angeles transplant for the past few years, he returns to San Francisco for a solo concert at Grace Cathedral on Friday -- his second there in 18 years.

The event, presented by SFJazz as part of its spring series, has a natural fit in the hall. There's a seven-second reverberation that should amplify his prayerful tone just fine, judging by a tape someone made of his 1988 solo there.

"When you reach a spiritual level," he says from Los Angeles, getting ready for the flight, "you become the instrument yourself.

"I just want them to feel me," he adds quietly. "I just show up and that's it. That's what the music sounds like."

Not entirely: His sound can be hypnotic or thunderous, depending on the night. Spontaneity, at least, one can predict.

Going solo is often undesirable for saxophonists, many of whom feel abandoned or pressured without a rhythm section. Sanders welcomes the challenge.

"I think people get the wrong idea about soloing," he says, "as if it means you have to play a lot of notes. It means you have more freedom to put more feelings through your music."

John Hicks was Sanders' chief pianist from the '60s through the '90s. "He's got plenty of endurance and a strong sound, so I think he'll handle it," says Hicks, laughing slightly over the phone from New York. "I don't know many saxophone players who can do that."

Born to a pair of musicians, Ferrell Sanders -- named "Pharoah" by Sun Ra, the avant-garde's Space Brother No. 1 -- moved to Oakland after high school, studying briefly in college before hitting the nightclubs -- Bop City, the Jazz Workshop and the Both/And, among them. In 1962 Sanders left for New York. Unable to find work, he slept on the streets and sold his blood for cash. "I was just trying to survive," he says.

Eventually he joined Ra's Arkestra, then fell in with the saxophone mavericks of the time: Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp -- who'd go on to revolutionize jazz, drawing praise and derision from critics.

After moving back to the East Bay, Sanders joined Coltrane's radical "free" group and stayed in it until Coltrane's death in 1967.

Here, however, is what gets lost in the conventional retelling: Sanders did not adopt Coltrane's tone -- Coltrane adopted Sanders'. Their styles are compatible, but who rubbed off on whom? It's clear: By the late '50s, Coltrane was up to his shoulders in pentatonic scales and minor modes, pioneering approaches to harmony. Sanders? Somewhere else completely.

Both tenors use overlapping rhythms and strong dissonance, an approach Sanders continued to refine into the 1970s. One of his favorite spots for it was the Keystone Korner in North Beach, which before closing in 1983 had incense on the stage, mandalas on the walls and lines out the door. A clear fit.

"It was the psychedelic era and people were very open to spiritual experiences," recalls the club's owner, Todd Barkan. "Pharoah's performances were becoming seances."

Barkan, now artistic administrator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, tells of a "humorous" but "frightening" night at Keystone Korner "when a drunken guy came in. Pharoah had a bowl he'd hit with a mallet, and it made such an intense vibration, the guy didn't want to go on that trip with Pharoah. The man must've weighed 400 pounds and he started swinging a huge chain! Then he started toward the stage, and I had to call our brothers in blue next door at the police station."

After a brief drop in popularity, Sanders climbed back in 1979 by signing to the Theresa label, where among other records (since released on CD by Evidence) he made the Bay Area classic "Journey to the One," which features the glowing "You've Got to Have Freedom." There's an even stronger version of that tune on "Live," which opens with Sanders' shock tenor in full flight.

Here was a rhythm section -- drummer Idris Muhammad, Hicks, bassist Walter Booker -- as powerful as any in jazz, and with Sanders at the helm it scoured the Bay Area. Muhammad, 66, performed at the Boom Boom Room a few weeks ago, and backstage he talked about his 25 years with Sanders: "We'd go back to the hotels after the shows to talk about what'd happened. I realized the creator has a way of doing things that you have no control over. We bonded as a team."

But not everyone supported Sanders.

In 1966, the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett savaged him, likening his solos to "elephant shrieks, which went on and on and on." Sanders' performance, he claimed, "appeared to have little in common with music."

In his review, Balliett quoted someone saying, "Exactly. It's not music and it isn't meant to be. It's simply sound, and has to be judged as such."

Even Sanders' supporters gave backhanded compliments: In 1972, The Chronicle's Dennis Hunt called him "primitive" and "nerve-wracking," then professed how much he enjoyed the music.

His detractors have one complaint worth refuting: They hear him as erratic, messy and overheated. They say he plays shrieking overtones as an alibi for his shortage of lyrical passages. He smears the solo as a metaphor for freedom, they say, which by itself cannot stand the test of time.

Here's what they miss: We go to Sanders not for Lester Young or Ben Webster or Coltrane, but for the colors and texture, the gravelly climax, the slippery whoosh and the prayerful ballad with touches, faintly, of Shepp and Jimmy Rushing and Bessie Smith echoed in the vibrato.

Nowhere else in today's music -- except in the albums of David S. Ware -- do we find that gargling, disciplined sound. Sanders' tone reflects the turbulence of the 1960s, and of today.

That's why he speaks to us, why the State Department brought him to Africa in the 1990s, why the Lines Ballet has frequently commissioned him. It's why Yoshi's sells out the instant his gigs are announced.

In 1966, Sanders told journalist Nat Hentoff after a recording session, "Everything you do has to mean something, has to be more than just notes."

Sanders, like Coltrane, lives that. Reflecting on Sanders' influence, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who rose to fame shortly before him, says by phone: "If there's anyone who has that quality of freedom, it's Pharoah. He's probably the best tenor player in the world."